Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles.
Psychol Sci. 2013 Sep;24(9):1722-31. doi: 10.1177/0956797613479387. Epub 2013 Aug 7.
The Google Books Ngram Viewer allows researchers to quantify culture across centuries by searching millions of books. This tool was used to test theory-based predictions about implications of an urbanizing population for the psychology of culture. Adaptation to rural environments prioritizes social obligation and duty, giving to other people, social belonging, religion in everyday life, authority relations, and physical activity. Adaptation to urban environments requires more individualistic and materialistic values; such adaptation prioritizes choice, personal possessions, and child-centered socialization in order to foster the development of psychological mindedness and the unique self. The Google Ngram Viewer generated relative frequencies of words indexing these values from the years 1800 to 2000 in American English books. As urban populations increased and rural populations declined, word frequencies moved in the predicted directions. Books published in the United Kingdom replicated this pattern. The analysis established long-term relationships between ecological change and cultural change, as predicted by the theory of social change and human development (Greenfield, 2009).
谷歌图书 Ngram 查看器允许研究人员通过搜索数百万本书籍来量化跨越几个世纪的文化。该工具用于测试有关人口城市化对文化心理学影响的基于理论的预测。适应农村环境优先考虑社会义务和责任、给予他人、社会归属感、日常生活中的宗教、权威关系和身体活动。适应城市环境需要更加个人主义和物质主义的价值观；这种适应优先考虑选择、个人财产和以儿童为中心的社会化，以培养心理意识和独特的自我。谷歌 Ngram 查看器从 1800 年到 2000 年在美国英语书籍中生成了这些价值观的索引词的相对频率。随着城市人口的增加和农村人口的减少，词汇频率朝着预测的方向发展。在英国出版的书籍复制了这种模式。该分析确立了社会变革和人类发展理论（Greenfield，2009）所预测的生态变化与文化变化之间的长期关系。
